While corporations are pumping megabucks into these concert extravaganzas, black promoters are demanding a piece of the rock...
Pepsi-Cola USA, the nation’s No. 2 soft-drink maker, paid an unprecedented $5 million for the rights to sponsor The Jackson’s tour and gain multimedia visibility the relationship ensured.
It was a risky venture given everything that could have gone wrong (and a lot did), but in the end Pepsi pulled off one of its most successful campaigns. The deal was not the first between a big music act and a major corporation, but it changed the rules and considerably raised the ante. Today, corporate sponsorships appear to be the way to go for headline music acts trying to find an underwriter for their flashy, expensive stage shows and for corporations eager to peddle their products to the youthful, billion-dollar-a-yea rock ‘n’ roll market...
Besides the Jacksons and (Lionel) Richie, few black acts have yet to substantially tape this relatively new financial network, partly because there are few black headline artists who reach the white audiences that corporations target as their market. DeBarge, for example, appears in commercials for McDonald’s, but the deal does not included concert sponsorship...
Excerpts taken from 1984 Black Enterprise Magazine article written by Miles White
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